It’s tough to think of a new movie about Judge Dredd without Sylvester Stallone’s 1995 adaptation offering dubious audience expectations. But Karl Urban insists that he was unintimidated by his iconic predecessor when he embarked on tackling the title character in Dredd.

“I approach each role on the merits of the role and try to service the character and service the script to the best of my ability,” he tells Celebuzz. “I’d read Dredd as a kid and I got the character and I got the world. And I wanted to do something that was different than what had been done before.”

What qualities did Urban want to bring to his version of Dredd?

Urban says that he tried to avoid being overwhelmed by the history of the character, instead simply looking at him as an individual.

“It was important not to approach the character like you’re playing an icon, but to find, identify the character’s humanity,” he says. “It was important to find his sense of humor – his great, often dry, dark sense of humor. It’s like a coping mechanism – it lets the steam out of the valve.”

Having now appeared in several different sci-fi and fantasy-oriented projects including Star Trek and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it would be understandable if Urban drew parallels between the acting challenges of those sorts of projects. But he insists that he finds similarities in all of his acting roles, regardless of whether he’s playing a futuristic police officer or a plain-old present-day civilian.

“I think it’s all fundamentally the same,” he observes. “You are experiencing the human condition – these are human stories – and it doesn’t matter if they’re set in the future or the past or some mythical world.”

Dredd is currently playing in theaters nationwide. Watch the video below for exclusive quotes from Urban in which he discusses his work on the upcoming Star Trek sequel.

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